Forgotten
by snailtk
Summary: An long abandoned Cerberus experiment wakes up some time after the reaper war.


Awareness came slowly, small steps at a time. Breathing felt wrong; tense, stale. They was also the first sounds she was aware of, her own ragged breaths, accompanied by a low background hum. Small bubbles tickled up the side of her leg. Her arm twitched and found slight liquid resistance, and a sucking pressure against her face.

As she woke up, sensations were translated into information. She was naked, submerged in liquid. There was a strap holding her upright, and the breathing mask on her face was feeding her recycled air. The pinching on her arm was probably an IV. Images swirled in her mind, not yet making much sense. Memories? They didn't feel like they belonged to her, false.

She opened her eyes to see her face reflected back in glass, pale and hollow. Beyond that there was little light, faintly blue, flickering to the right. Dark shapes that could be consoles were clustered in that area. Everything screamed Danger to her, but nothing was moving, nothing was happening. She searched the images in her mind to try and find something useful, that might tell her where she was, but nothing was coming. The scene before her didn't fit anything she knew.

Deep breath, eyes closed, open again, think. No one was here, and she cant stay in this.. pod. She pulled her legs up against her chest, the balls of her feet pressing on the glass, and with as much force as she could muster, she pushed.

Nothing happened. She looked around for anything, a lever, and edge. Everything was smooth. She felt around with her free arm and feet where she couldn't see. She tried kicking the bottom of the glass. With all the struggling, an irrational and sudden claustrophobic panic set in, and she started screaming in fear and frustration, slamming herself against the glass.

Some time during her panicked thrashing, her breathing mask came loose, and she took in half a lung of the thickened liquid before she could get a grip on the mask and hold it back on, sputtering. At the same time, red lights and alarms went off around her pod, and the liquid was suddenly being drained through a grate at her feet. The glass popped loose with a short hsssss.

She didn't move at first. She slowly lowered her hand, and her mask with it, smelling the new air. It was cooler, musty but fresher then what was in the tube. The deep breath made her start coughing up the liquid she had just inhaled. Goosebumps erupted along her skin, but for now that the fear had faded she found herself drained and exhausted.

Slow, full of caution as the silence seemed to press in from the outside, she examined her predicament. She was in a lab. Recovering from injuries? Her last memories were... No, nothing she remembered felt real. The thought made her feel cold.

There were a jumble of images, a distant life. They were incomplete and tinny, like something being heard through a long metal pipe. The last one was of being sucked out of the side of her ship, suffocating. Her chest tightened at the images, especially having the same panic so recently reinforced. But the memories were so far away, so long ago, she thought. She was all right. Coughing, she slowly pushed open the pod to get a better look at the darkened room.

Most of the lights and electronics were off or broken. Fighting had happened here, there were bodies on the ground. She wondered distantly why she couldn't smell them, while unstrapping her left arm, and removing the IV there. They wore the armour of Cerberus, with its black and yellow logo. The colors made her think of hornets. Fierce but small.

With the strap on her chest removed, she stepped out of the pod. There were several more of the pods in the room, six on two opposite walls, most of them looked occupied. A cluster of consoles and medical equipment stood on the far side, the electronics on something still spitting sparks. To the left front was a door. Three armoured bodies lay on the floor, as well as two others in medical uniforms. Those in the uniforms were skeletal, dry. There was a slight musty smell, nothing more.

She looked over the bodies of the medical staff, and took one of the omni-tools. She needed to know what was going on, information. This tool had belonged to Adrian Kohl, and a number of personal letters, detailed schematics on hypnopedia, biotics, and very specific cybernetics were available. Most of it was above her understanding, but it gave her a gist of what was going on.

Next, a jacket. It was about three sizes too large, but it was hanging on the back of a chair, and untouched. It was stained, a dark yellow when it should have been white, but not nearly as bad as what was being worn by the bodies. Rolling up the sleeves, she then went to the terminals and downloaded everything that was available. It wasn't much, but hopefully there would be something useful on later review.

There was a status menu of all of the pods in the room, the console blinking dimly. Three had been manually terminated, dated over three years ago. She checked those against what was in the room. The terminated ones were empty. As she was looking, one of the other occupied pods stood out. A clone of herself was inside, though her hair was much shorter, and the body was entirely coated in soft, velvety mold. Despite that, the face was eerily peaceful and whole looking, though the eyes were too dark, sunken.

Her pod was listed as opened due to a safety malfunction. Five were listed as offline. Looking into the error reports, they had simply lost generator power. The bodies inside were mostly preserved. Those pods were also all on the same side of the wall, opposite from where her pod had been. Three were simply listed as Complete, blinking green. Looking at the details, it gave a list of.. programs. Memory Simulations... Complete; Extraneous Learning Materials... Complete; Survival Protocols... Complete; Mnemonic Definitions... Complete, Muscle Memory Definitions... Complete, Biotic Cognizance and Applications... Complete. Awaiting manual animation. Standby Mode. Clones. They were all clones.

She felt shocked, rooted to her position, but also felt extremely exposed. It was probably safe to assume she had been in the same status as the.. complete.. pods before she woke up. So why did she wake and not the others? They were all on the same wall she had been on, through two were the terminated ones, empty. The rest were there, in stasis.

Now she had an overwhelming need for her own armour, a pistol, something to make herself feel more normal. She was a soldier, and felt it in her bones, but she now also had use of.. biotics. The memories she held, that woman didn't have biotics, just guns and tech. Hand to hand combat. Still, she instinctively knew how to use the new powers, enveloping herself in a blue glow, just to prove she could. Making sure it was reality. Biotic Cognizance...some program downloaded into her brain, with new implants. The other pods would be there later, she left them to look around a bit more.

Shivering, she opened the only door to the room, and cautiously entered. Also empty of people, and dark. This was the same side of the room the powerless pods resided. She used the flashlight on the stolen omni-tool to look around. Most of the room looked blasted, blackened, melted plastic and exposed wire. The air was hard to breathe, stale and dusty.

She made quick work searching the facility. The research/pod room was the largest in the small space station. Second was the mess, where she managed to find some packaged rations that were still edible. According to everything she could find, the last human activity on the station was two and a half years ago. It had been abandoned after a firefight, with her and her sisters still alive. Why they had left without dealing with the still functioning pods was unrecorded. The cause that had shut off the row of pods had been a year after everyone had vacated. Despite the damage to that side of the station, the power source had been taken out by a massive EMP rather then the fight as it first appeared. The other generator was a much older model and was unaffected.

Several suits of armour made to fit her, and presumably her sisters, were held in an armoury. Distinctive black and red N7 armour, complete with forged omni-tools and spectre-grade weapons. With these things she could have easily impersonated Commander Shepard, the Commanders thin memories flickering through her mind. Cut her hair, take the tools with her name coded in them..but so much time had passed. She had been in stasis for years.. those pods had been complete for over two years, yet no one had used them, woken them up. She had found catalogs in the files for training regimes after 'animation', to get them in fighting and infiltrating readiness. Either the plan had been abandoned, or rendered obsolete. Or forgotten.

She looked at the omni-tools meant for being the Commander, and then back at the one she had taken from the technician. She had some decisions to make.


End file.
